How to make your personal computer boot up faster

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of the Toshiba Laptop Battery   First post by: www.itsbattery.com

Why boot up? Michael G., a long-time friend of mine, recently went to Singapore to get himself a gorgeous Toshiba Portege. Powered by a Mobile Pentium running at 300 MHz, the machine was quite zippy. Michael then started installing tons of utilities and drivers, including Norton Utilities and Zip Drive utilities. A couple of days later, he called me andcomplained, ""This notebook is now very slow.""

He complained that the screen painted very slowly, almost one line at a time. It was like staring at the screen of a 286 machine that ran Windows 95 with only 4 MB of RAM. Had the processor really lost its power? Was the system damaged in any way? Michael wanted to make sure. I figured, however,that what he perceived as a significant decrease in the notebook's speed was actually the long boot-up time.

When the machine first came out from the factory, it was a clean one. There were probably just a few programs that would be loaded automatically each time he booted it up or restarted Windows. Once additional utilities and drivers were installed, the computer had to load each of them before itwas ready for him to launch his productivity tool--such as Microsoft Word.

I told Michael to check the StartUp folder in his system, and my suspicion was confirmed. He had more than a dozen items on the list in the folder. This meant that each time his notebook--fast as it was--had to loadmore than a dozen programs and utilities before it handed control over to him. In the process, while the computer was busy loading the programs, the data that went to the screen also trickled, giving him the impression that the machine had lost its breath.

The StartUp Folder

It is really recommended to keep the list of programs that Windows has toload during the boot up process to the minimum, particularly if you have a notebook. That way, you will be able to start working right away once it ispowered up, and this will also save battery power such as Toshiba PA3250U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3356U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3291U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3506U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3591U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba Portege 4000 Battery, Toshiba Satellite A10 Battery, Toshiba Satellite A100 Battery, Toshiba Satellite A70 Battery, Toshiba Satellite A75 Battery. If you do not use your Zip Drive all the time, its utilities need not be loaded. If you do not useOffice Shortcut bar (and, to tell the truth, very few of us do), just throwit away.

How do you access the StartUp folder? Click on Windows' Start button, click on Settings and then Taskbar & Start Menu. The Taskbar Properties dialog box will appear. Click on the Start Menu Programs tab, and then on the Advanced button. You will get an Explorer-like dialog box as shown in the accompanying picture. Click on the Programs folder on the left pane. When the list of the subfolders appears, click on StartUp (you may have to scroll down a little if your menu list has grown quite long). Once StartUp is selected, you can see the contents on the right pane.

The list that you see under StartUp is basically the list of programs andutilities that Windows automatically load each time it starts. Some of themhad better be there. Acrobat Reader, for example, is necessary if you oftendownload and read PDF files off the Internet. My system has QuickShelf 95 on the list because I use Microsoft Bookshelf 95 quite a lot (I like its dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia).

A lot of other programs also like to add their own shortcut icons on the System Tray, believing that we will need them and use them. If you do not send or receive phone calls with your PC and modem, there is no reason to include in the StartUp list the answering machine utility that comes with your modem.